Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

sergio1972 wrote:

Carbonara sauce mainly consists of cream.

Sorrym but carbonara has no crea neither it has any sauce of any kind. Carbonara is just eggs and cheese beaten toghether and added to the pasta and tossed pancetta. So it can't be stale either, since carbonara sauce just dose not exist: pasta alla carbonara is born onlyt the very moment you add the eggs to the piping-hot pasta and pancetta and stir it around until it gets creamy.

Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

Many Italians do. The use of cream in several pasta recipes is a legacy of the late 1970's when it started being added to correct mistakes. Cream flattens out mistakes, smooths out the saltyness, hides away bad quality of the ingredients and burhes up stale stuff. In the 1970's a new dish appeared in many restaurants: pasta "dello chef", which was essentially all of yesterdays pasta sauce leftovers stirred toghether with a good measure of cream. Since then cream started to be added in about each and every pasta dish. Prosciutto and peas tagliatelle used to be just peas cooked in butter with added prosciutto dices, but this required a bit of accuracy to make the whole thing creamy: you had to drain your tagliatelle leaving a bit of water aside, toss the taglaitelle with the buttery mixture of prosciutto and peas, adding water to get enough starch to "stick" and make it all creamy enough. Adding cream solved the issue and made making this sauce easy, pity that it tasted of cream instead of peas and prosciutto! The same goes for mushroom or truffle pasta. The addiction of cream to carbonara is also supposed to help with creamyness: thoeretically, carbonara should be made only with the freshest, free-range, organic eggs, so that you minimize health risks with no need to cook the eggs. This is because carbonara required the egg to be essentially raw! Adding cream allows you to use cheaper, intensive-farmed eggs because you can now actually cook your eggs retaining the creamyness. Onm the other hand, these eggs taste much worse, and cream drains the egg taste so that you are not really tasting the egg, or so that any bad tastes get diluted and you notice them less. Essentually, adding cream is useful to restaurants who want to get rid of stale, cheap eggs.

Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

Again, I will offer the thought that with all the thousands of people eating at Jamie's restaurant every week, we only occasionally hear of someone who is unhappy....

That being said, and I'm not sure how the business is set up, if Jamie is sole owner of each of those restaurants, he should be interested if food is being prepared improperly. If they are "franchises" (do you have those there?), then the individual manager/owners are primarily responsible for the quality of the food. That is why you will see a wide difference in the quality of food in some franchise chains, the man whose name is over the door has very little control of what's going on inside. Jamie's empire has grown very quickly in the last few years, and it's only natural that he has to rely on others.

I would love to be able to visit one of his restaurants. I think he's a great guy and a wonderful chef, and if I had a bad meal, I would send it back to the kitchen, but not think that Jamie was personally responsible of one plate of bad pasta.

Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

Well I'd like to appologise to the original poster and also to thank you all for whats an amazing info to me. Carbonara was actually the first dish I was taught to cook. It was about 20 years ago. Obviously wasnt a chef who taught me and Ive always cooked it with cream (silly belief). Then a few years ago I read Jamie's recipe which also has cream and also lemon zest that really adds a great touch to it.

It goes to show that we are always learning...

Now this new info brings me to a question: do you use just egg yolks or both yolk and whites?

Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

Both, but it dipends on pasta amounts and eggs sizes. I f a whole egg seems too much, then I only use the yolk, so a carbonara for four may be made with 320 grams of pasta and three large eggs or three whole small eggs and one yolk.

Re: Italian restaurant in London: very bad quality of food!

I then take another look.Before going to any restaurant I have to find out information.You may also likeI use Restaau.co.uk - intelligent search engine. With Restaau• You can filter search results easily by different aspects such as Cuisines, Distance, Price, Dinning Options, Good For, Star…• View details of a restaurant with telephone, location, photos, description and reviews from internet community about that restaurant.

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